Stolen Years: Australian prisoners of war

Prisoners of the Japanese

Over 22,000 Australian servicemen and almost forty nurses were captured by
the Japanese. Most were captured early in 1942 when Japanese forces captured
Malaya, Singapore, New Britain, and the Netherlands East Indies. Hundreds of
Australian civilians were also interned.

By the war’s end more than one in three of these prisoners – about
8,000 – had died. Most became victims of their captors’ indifference
and brutality. Tragically, over a thousand died when Allied submarines torpedoed
the unmarked ships carrying prisoners around Japan’s wartime empire.

In 1945 survivors were liberated from camps all over Asia: some in the places
they had been captured, others in Burma and Thailand, Taiwan, Korea, and even
Japan itself.

An Australian prisoner of war showing the effects of malnutrition from working
on the Burma–Thailand Railway.P01433.020